And the winner is…

This is a follow-up to the quest posted before regarding the most straightforward, but not necessarily the most elegant, synthesis of 3,4-difluorothiophene. Bear in mind, our goal was to get a decent amount of the material as swiftly as possible; a completely new reaction type for Org. Lett. would have been nice, but not something we could afford aiming for, neither time- nor money-wise.

The bad news is that I am not yet at liberty to speak about how things turned out eventually. Neither can I say what we actually needed the material for. The only thing I can offer at this point is that the synthesis is many, many times more simple than the work-up that follows — exactly as anticipated. The boiling point of the desired material is around 60 °C, and the vapor pressure… the use of for instance a rotavap ensures an isolated yield of 0 %.

Hopefully, all the details will be revealed in a publication or a patent application later this year, but at the time of writing I dare not promise anything. Sorry.

Many, many of you put a great deal of effort into this, and for that I am eternally grateful. For good reasons, I consider the original post the mightiest one of them all on this blog thus far. Not because of what I wrote, but because of all the comments it received. Read through them again, if you have the time. I can assure you that everybody, at every level of your chemistry career, can learn one or two things in there.

The good news is that I have — finally — decided to name a winner. The winning contribution contained every element we were asking for: Buy something, one simple transformation, done.

Yes, it is you, James:

But I’m not exactly sure who you are!? Please forward me your contact details (preferably via email), and I will send you the prize money right away.

Congratulations!

P.S. James isn’t the most uncommon name out there, and it could well be a pseudonym. Since this James didn’t link his name to an URL, I feel somewhat confident that it isn’t masterorganicchemistry.com-James this time around. Nevertheless, I have the original James’ IP address, so don’t push your luck, thugs!